Through the Interface

Paraty to Rio de Janeiro

The weather wasn’t great during our first few days in Paraty, but at least we were dry after the thorough soaking we received in Sao Paolo. We used the time to do a few “non-beach” tourist activities, such as renting a boat to take us around the coast, walking in the jungle and visiting a cachaça distillery. The old town of Paraty is really nice, too: The place we were staying in – the Resort Croce del Sud – was really special. It had been built by an Italian named Luca, who had previously built a boat he was... Read more →

The future of VR is web and mobile

Last night, I left the (very fun) party at the X Summit a little early: partly because I knew I was presenting this morning and needed a clear head, but mainly to attend a WebVR meet-up being held at Mozilla. I’m rarely in the Bay Area and it seemed a shame to miss the opportunity to attend the event, especially as it was a chance to hang out with Jim Quanci and Goran Borjesson, a colleague visiting from Gothenberg. I’ll describe my experiences of the evening’s proceedings, but you can also watch the online recording. It was really an... Read more →

Autodesk SoCap

I’m excited to announce the newest member of the Autodesk product portfolio, Autodesk SoCap. The term “SoCap” stands for “Software Capture”, in much the same way as ReCap stands for “Reality Capture”. SoCap is a tool that helps you capture existing software behaviour as code, just as ReCap helps you capture a 3D scene as a point cloud. For SoCap to do its thing, you point it at the piece of software whose behaviour you want to capture – whether desktop software on Windows/Linux/OS X, mobile software targeting iOS/Android* or the URL of a cloud-based app – and SoCap... Read more →

Creating a VR-friendly 3D HTML5 UI for Google Cardboard

After building native Android apps for both Gear VR and Google Cardboard that embed our web-based VR samples using Autodesk’s View & Data API, I really wanted to revisit the UI issue. After seeing the 3D UI capabilities of Gear VR – courtesy of the Oculus Mobile SDK – my own UI that I implemented in HTML felt, well, flat. The main problem seemed to be that it moved with your head, staying stuck to your view. It also suffered from the issue of visual degradation when the selection was away from the middle of the list. All in... Read more →

Using NFC to launch your Google Cardboard app

When I first got my Google Cardboard toolkit – in my case the DODOcase VR Toolkit V1 – I was fascinated by the NFC tag that came with it. I hadn’t really played with NFC, prior to that, and only had a very vague idea of what it was about. It turns out that NFC is this important new(ish) technology that’s enabling all kinds of local (hence “near-field”) communications. Especially, it seems, in the area of mobile payments with technologies such as Apple Pay. Anyway, my first exposure to NFC was via this business card-sized sticker that came in... Read more →

Integrating web-based VR samples into a native Google Cardboard app using the Cardboard SDK for Android

I mentioned this in last Friday’s post: after building an Android app to bring our web-based VR samples to Gear VR, it made sense to do the same for Google Cardboard. It made sense for 3 reasons: Most importantly, I wanted to see what the additional capabilities of the Android SDK would bring to the web-based VR samples, particularly around the magnetic trigger button. Until the Note 4 gets its Lollipop update in “early 2015” – and WebViews support WebGL – there isn’t much more to do with Gear VR. I’ve completed the plumbing but am waiting for the... Read more →

Stereoscopy

I’ve long been fascinated by stereoscopy, as I suspect is the case for most people lucky enough to have two functioning eyes. There’s something magical about a device that immerses us in a three dimensional scene by hijacking that fundamental input mechanism of ours, binocular vision. I almost always get that “oh wow” feeling: it just never gets old. I also happen to like collecting cool bits of vintage technology, although in an admittedly haphazard and opportunistic way: I have printing blocks, a typewriter, a TI-57 programmable calculator, an Apple Newton, a Palm Pilot and an iPAQ, to name... Read more →

123D Catch available for Android

I was very happy to read the news on Shaan’s blog: 123D Catch is now available on Android. I blogged about its availability via the web and on iOS, a couple of years ago, but there’s now an Android version and it’s pretty slick. Some quick background info: I do my best to stay OS agnostic, as a rule. My primary desktop OS is Windows (7 or 8.1, depending) but I also use OS X Mavericks and play with a few different Linux distributions when I get time. I have an old iPad 2 that has a cracked –... Read more →

Driving AutoCAD using a SensorTag’s accelerometer

Over the last few days, I’ve been playing around with Texas Instruments’ SensorTag device, working out how to connect it to AutoCAD and make use of the data coming in from it to manipulate the current view. As mentioned in this previous post, the SensorTag is a $25 device containing a number of sensors – an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a magnetometer, a thermometer, a hygrometer and a barometer – that communicates to a monitoring system (whether an iOS or Android mobile device or a Windows or Linux PC) via Bluetooth 4.0. So what is it I expected to do... Read more →

AU 2012 class recordings now available online

This week has so far had an AU theme to it, just as last week we talked exclusively about Leap Motion and AutoCAD. Perhaps I’m sub-consciously shifting this blog to a weekly-themed format? Hmm. Like many of you, I’m sure, I received an email over the weekend to let me know that the recorded sessions from Autodesk University 2012 are now available online (for anyone with a valid AU online account). I wasn’t sure which of my sessions had made it up there from this last year’s event (thank goodness I rarely have to write cheques anymore), and so... Read more →

AU 2012 Handout: Moving code to the cloud – it’s easier than you think – Part 2

After introducing the topic – as well as creating our basic, local web-service – in the last post, today we’re going to publish our MVC 4 Web API application to the cloud and see it working from a number of different client environments. Preparing to publish to Azure Now that we’re ready to publish to Azure, we need to add a deployment project to our solution. Right-click “ApollonianPackingWebApi” in the Solution Explorer and select “Add Windows Azure Cloud Service Project”. This will add a new project into our solution. We can now double-click the entry under the “Roles” folder... Read more →

Debugging an OpenGL ES 2.0 application using a virtual Android device

With my AUv recording out of the way, I’ve been starting to think more seriously about my AU sessions, over the last few days. The “big one” (with 100+ registered attendees and counting) is about moving code from a desktop application to the cloud, and will basically summarise the process I followed in my “cloud & mobile” series of earlier in the year. Which means I’ll go through the process of pulling some code out of a desktop-based application and placing it behind a web-service, before calling the service from a variety of platforms/environments (AutoCAD via .NET, iOS, Android,... Read more →

Series of posts on mobile Revit model viewing

I’m hopefully sunning myself on the beaches of Brittany, at this point, but here’s some information that Mikako Harada kindly brought to my attention. Adam Nagy has put together a fantastic series of posts on the AEC DevBlog that I think will be of general interest: Revit model viewer for iOS – part 1 Revit model viewer for iOS – part 2 Revit model viewer for iOS – part 3 Adam was apparently inspired by Philippe Leefsma’s Inventor viewer for Android – something I’ll also link to, once I see it’s been published. Read more →

Cloud & mobile series summary

As we reach the end of this long series of posts on moving code to the cloud – and a look at ways to use the functionality from a wide variety of applications, many of them on mobile devices – I felt it was worth putting together a quick summary post to reinforce the overall message (which may have been a bit lost in the sheer volume of information). Firstly, here are the posts in this series, including those looking at the original creation of the “desktop” application functionality: Creating the core desktop functionality Circle packing in AutoCAD: creating... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using Android – Part 3

I hadn’t actually planned a 3rd part to this series, but Dennis Ippel kindly spent some time looking at the code posted in the last post, to see where optimisations might be made to increase the sphere count. Consequently, Dennis made some changes to the Rajawali framework to support batch rendering of objects, as well as suggesting some client-side changes that make use of object cloning to avoid the need for replicated vertex buffers, index buffers, textures, etc. – all properties/dependent objects that the code was previously creating per sphere. The results were stunning: with really a modest change... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using Android – Part 2

In the last post, we took a quick look at some basics around developing application for Android, while today we’re going to see the code for our Apollonian Viewer application. Or, as my 5 year-old likes to call it, the “sweetie planet” app :-). Last time, I mentioned Dennis Ippel as the author of the Rajawali framework I’ve used in this app. What I didn’t mention is how helpful he has been with getting this app working: Dennis gave hints that unblocked my efforts on a number of occasions, and even implemented new capabilities in Rajawali to enable several... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using Android – Part 1

In the last post, we looked at an approach for bringing data from our Apollonian web-service into a Unity3D scene. Our next “off piste” look at consuming data from this web-service is on the Android platform. This is my first serious attempt at mobile development (ignoring some fooling around I did with Embedded Visual C++ for Windows Mobile, way back when) although I have spent some time looking at WinRT (which basically means I’ve now built a Windows Phone 8 app, I suspect :-). So why did I choose Android, rather than iOS? No real reason: I have both... Read more →